The Battlefield 3 Beta

It was an exciting day at PC Perspective yesterday with much our time dedicated to finding, installing and playing the new Battlefield 3 public beta. Released on the morning of the 26th to those of you who had pre-ordered BF3 on Origin or those of you who had purchased Medal of Honor prior to July 26th, getting the beta a couple of days early should give those of you with more FPS talent than me a leg up once the open beta starts on Thursday the 29th.

My purpose in playing Battlefield 3 yesterday was purely scientific, of course. We wanted to test a handful of cards from both AMD and NVIDIA to see how the beta performed. With all of the talk about needing to upgrade your system and the relatively high recommended system requirements, there is a lot of worry that just about anyone without a current generation GPU is going to need to shell out some cash.

Is that a justified claim? While we didn't have time yet to test EVERY card we have at the office we did put some of the more recent high end, mid-range and lower cost GPUs to the test.

Before I jump into the results, I thought I would just take a quick moment to describe the way Battlefield 3 works on the PC as it is quite different than what you might be used to with other PC games. Rather than just launching the game, you first have to launch Origin, which is essentially EA's take on the Valve Steam client. Yes, I am one of those people that desperately wanted EA to just adopt the Steam platform so we could have "one to rule them all", but giant companies like this just don't do that. So Origin it is. After opening it and logging in, then selecting the BF3 Beta, rather than starting the game you actually get a browser opened up:

The entire server browser, friends list, group creation and more actually launches from your default web browser rather than the Origin client or even the BF3 game itself. And since we saw disabled buttons for co-op and for single player selections I am guessing that even when this game is released on October 25th, this interface will remain.

The controls aren't really THAT bad and in some ways it is nice to be able to look for servers to join while still having other windows open and being able to do or check on other tasks besides Battlefield 3. The server list doesn't update as often as I would like so you never know if you are trying to join a server that has become full since the list originally loaded but most of my first day of testing was done hitting that magical "quick match" button.

Initially, the BF3 game loads in a window and that happened in ALL CASES for me. EA tells you in several places that the shortcut to go full screen is "ALT + ENTER" and in my case only the left ALT button actually did that. Other than that minor nuisance, the game loaded up pretty well.

Our Testing Process and Headaches

Testing a multiplayer game is hard and is made even more so by the fact that you cannot create your own servers to control who joins, etc. This left me running around on seemingly random servers (since getting on the same server twice seemed nearly impossible) trying not to die during my many 120 second FRAPS runs. Because of this, keeping an exact path and process for our benchmarking testing was impossible and instead we mitigated that issue by playing it for MANY sets of benchmarking results for each card and in each setting. We then had to manually look at the results and find which were the "average" while kicking out those that had especially high or especially low scores.

For the most part, we were able to get fairly consistent benchmark runs though at the expense of whatever team happened to be saddled with me. (Sorry Internet!) Here you can see a set of three results from the outdoor section of the Metro map on the GTX 580 with Ultra quality settings:

So even though there was some variance that is pretty much impossible to avoid in a large multiplayer game like this, my methods did result in good repeatability.

As I mentioned above, all of our testing was done on the "Operation Metro" map as it was the only one publicly available on the first day of the beta. Rumors are circulating that soon the second map will open with 64 player support and vehicles so we are going to keep an eye on that for sure and see if performance is drastically affected.

There were two sections of the Metro map though that had very different performance characteristics and thus we tested them independently. Of three main areas on the map, the first starts in a larger outdoor area, the second takes place inside tunnels of a subway while the third returns outside in a more cityscape style design. My testing differentiated between the first outdoor section as being the most GPU intensive while the indoor section was much easier on the graphics card. You will see results for both map areas on the following pages.

Also, just to get as many different cards in as we could with the limited amount of time in a day, we ran all of our testing at 1920x1200 resolution and at Ultra quality settings.

We will start with performance testing between our NVIDIA and AMD cards on the next page and then take a quick look at image quality comparisons between NVIDIA and AMD following that.

Our test setup included a Core i7-965 Nehalem processor, 6GB of DDR3 memory and a 600GB VelociRaptor hard drive. We used the latest drivers from both NVIDIA and AMD that were released specifically yesterday for Battlefield 3: 285.38 for NVIDIA and 11.10 Preview for AMD.

Thanks Ryan for your day 1 review, I along with the community greatly appreciate this at the time. I can't wait to hop on BF3 come Thursday to test out my GTX460. I could get 45 - 70fps at 1680 x 1050 on Battlefield Bad Company 2 at max so looks like BF3 is going to be pretty rough on my card. Can't wait to see more test from you and your crew.

If you read page one where Ryan tells us the specs of the PC being used he says and I quote ”We used the latest drivers from both NVIDIA and AMD that were released specifically yesterday for Battlefield 3: 285.38 for NVIDIA and 11.10 Preview for AMD.”

I just wanted to say that i have a Q9550 (3.6ghz) and a 6950 2Gb Flashed to 6970 shaders (BF3 Beta Drivers installed). I am getting 50 average outdoors in the park (never dipping below 40) and indoors the average is about 80, sometimes as high as 90FPS.
I game settings are on auto, which has res at 1920x1080, Ultra, 16x AA, and everything on High and Ultra.
To be honest i was expecting much lower frame rates. BC2 and the Witcher 1 had worse frame rates than im getting in BF3. Im loving it though, and im buying a second 6950 to Crossfire.

Odd however is my friend whos using my GTS-250 (512mb) is unplayable in full screen with everything on as low as it can go (at 1920x1080) but he played BC2 on medium everything (same res) and it was smooth.

Hi Ryan, i own a i5-2500k @ stock clocks 3.30Ghz...i am planning on overclocking it to 4.5ghz to take advantage of its "K" factor...so my question is...will that increase the fps ingame by much?
and in between...RAM, processor speed, GPU...which might you think will be a dominating factor and by how much?

On a different note Seeing as there isnt much difference between high and ultra except for a little smoothing of textures and the AA...would you kindly put up a performance chart of the cards running on high?

Because if there is a considerable increase in the fps, there might not be any reason to run the game at ultra at all... keeping in mind the comparitively high loss in performance.

any feedback is greatly appreciated :)
and thank you for all your hardwork, really is helping us make important decisions on our purchases.

"Overall I think the NVIDIA cards are currently offering just a bit better experience than the AMD cards due to my instability with the HD 6970 and the better multi-GPU scaling being reported with SLI than CrossFire."

How can you say SLI scaling is better than Crossfire scaling when you didn't even test Crossfire? If you're generalizing, that's some pretty bad "scientific" testing.

@durjoy184
Depends what the bottleneck is. What is your graphics card? I play Medal of Honor and had a Q6600@4GHz, with a 5850. when i changed to a 2500K, at stock, it doubled my frames. But still at 4.5GHz, it only added about about 5% more frames

so your saying that i might get a considerable performance boost if i go from 3.3-4.5ghz? :O

and as for ur MOH situation...i think games like those that dont demand much of the cpu....just get overkilled after a stage and cant go any smoother....like...if im playing C0D right now....and play it after 4.5ghz....there wouldnt be any difference at all....but on games like crysis, metro 2033...which are more demanding...it may take effect

i just wanted to make sure of the same for battlefield 3 too before i did any overclocking. :)

I think a visit to ebay might help.
Some serious bargins. Got my 990x there.
(Yip. Was nervous but it arrived and worked a treat.)
I did my brothers dell too. A Core 2 system. Just swapped out the chips,Dual to quad. Ebayed the dual and got some money back. Just need to check your chipset.

Even with the 11.10 previews I'm getting bad texture artifacts outdoors. The recently released 11.9 and CAP 11.8/4 are a hair better on my unlocked 6950/xfire setup. Frames are nice and steady with all the bells and whistles maxed out.

well i know i have been play the last 3 days! i have 2 evga 465gtx in sli and got 58fps with everything maxed out. i will say the servers are far to laggy in any setting though. im not sure what to think about this game, i dont know if it is that i have been waiting for ever to play it and had to high of expectations for the game but it is not what i thought it would be:( lol. and im all about battlefield till the end!!!

Would definitely like to knew where those stands at middle settings with things like SSAO turned off. I'll be heartbroken if the game isn't playable with this card, the 260 isn't bad at all (especially the 216 revision). :(

Since we know that a typical i5/i7 + 570/6970 setup can easily run this game with no issue

Perhaps u could try test something like this.

1. minimum CPU/GPU combo to run @ min 24-30fps @ 1680x1050/1280x1024/1024x768 on LOW setting, WITHOUT AA/Anisotropic. Yes cut everything u can. I still see u run 2x aniso @ 9800GT. Why we need to on these when we need to cut every detail out for fps right?

So I downloaded battlefield 3 beta even know that nvidia says that I couldn't run this game,however I knew that my card could handle this game easy. I run crysis 2 on it without any lags at 1920X 1200.I got an amd athlon X 11 quad core 3.0. 6gb ram 1tb and 460gtx nvidia.my pc runs battlefield 3 beta at 1980x1020. No problems just download the new driver!!

Ultra w/anti-aliasing in this game is pretty pointless IMO. It does so much post-processing there aren't many hard edges to soften... my AMD 955 w/stock 5850 gets well above 30fps outdoors, all ultra settings except for AA (which is turned off), and approaches 60 in the subway tunnels.

Performance on the big outdoor 64 player map is better than you would think, very comparable to outdoors on the Metro map, although it seems a lot buggier. I noticed many more problems with the destroyable buildings on that map, more stability issues, and occasional frame rate tanks with little rhyme or reason.

I am currently running a system with an E6600 Core 2 and 2X EVGA GTX460s SC 1GB in SLI, overclocked. All set on the graphics front. However, I have been waiting for Bulldozer to build a new system. With the desktop part release pushing further into the future, it may take longer than planned to build a new rig. Therefore, I very well may be using this CPU and sys at the release of BF3.
I am also curious what other Core 2 CPU users, who have good GPUs, are finding in terms of performance. I am downloading the beta now (along with the NVidia beta driver), so I will report results tomorrow.

hmmm very interesting indeed ..im running an skv 9800 slrdram with dual cooled cores at 9.7699 ghz ...in ultra high mood i have noticed that after shooting an enemy to approximately 20% health... there seem to be pop stains on the characters pants around the buttox area...a detail that would have gone unoticed if ur not running maximus titan 7.29 mercess shader buffer.

I have a late 2010 MBP running Windows 7 x64, i7 processor, 2.66GHz, and 4GB RAM, and have the NVIDIA GT M330 graphics card. I've put my computer on performance mode, downloaded the 285.38 drivers, and turned all the graphics settings on low in the beta, but I'm still getting pretty choppy gameplay. Does anyone know a fix to this because I've heard of people getting smooth gameplay with the same system as me. Thanks!

Hey, right now i have an old intel core 2 duo overclocked to 2.56 ghz and an nvidia gtx 260m. I can run that on low-medium with a decent frame rate. I will be getting a new computer before the year ends and was wondering how this would do. Intel Core i5 2500k @3.3ghz---nVidia gtx 560 2gb

Great review you made Ryan thank you.
just to mention, I have XFX HD 6970 and I did not face the issue you mentioned regard the crash outside in metro! yes I face this on first day of releasing public beta but then everything went smooth. I play on 1080p. if you want some result regard this card on outside you are welcome. but keep in mind the max resolution is 1080p.

I've been running the BF3 beta on a GTX 460 1GB MSI Hawk, slightly OC'ed to 850/1700/2000, a I5 2600k @ 4.3, and 8gb ddr 1600, and I get a average of 50-65 inside, and 40-50 outside. On 1920.. That's of course with only light AA on, but still..

Hello, exelent review, but i have a question, i have the EVGA 460 2win card, do you think that i will be able to play this monster game in ultra setings with good frame rates, mi CPUits I7 920 OC to 3.4, 6 gbram 1726mhrz.

Hello, exelent review, but i have a question, i have the EVGA 460 2win card, do you think that i will be able to play this monster game in ultra setings with good frame rates, mi CPUits I7 920 OC to 3.4, 6 gbram 1726mhrz.

I have a geforce 460 and battlefield 3 runs very smooth. however, doesnt quite look like the textures are as good as BC2. I have a quad-core phenom II 965 OC up a hair to 3.7Ghz, 8GB RAM, and running at 1920X1080. Im sure it must be my graphics card that is limiting my texture and detail. any detailed advice on getting the quality better in settings would be greatly appreciated.just a temporary fix til I upgrade in a couple months. Thanks.